Sweet & Salty Reviews: Nite Fire: Flashpoint by C.L. Schneider

The Dish
Flashpoint is the first book in the Nite Fire trilogy by C.L. Schneider, an urban fantasy series told in first-person from the perspective of human-dragon hybrid, Dahlia Nate. The book is a good, long length but doesn’t really feel long. The majority of events occur on modern day earth, with some short trips to ‘Drimera’, Dahlia’s homeworld and home of the dragons.

When Blackthorn Book Tours announced they were doing a tour for this book, I decided I had to read it. It’s been awhile since I read a good, old-fashioned urban fantasy and that is exactly what Flashpoint delivers.

The Sauce
Dragons are real. They rule the multiverse and govern the travel and interaction of all species. Their willing servants are the lyrriken, human-dragon hybrids, who are capable of shifting into scaled demi-dragon forms with magical abilities (flame, water, etc.) They are totally awesome. This is the gist of it, but the book has a lot more going on than just that.

The Sweet
There’s a lot to like about Flashpoint. Dahlia is a tough, no-nonsense protagonist. Her strengths are believable of her character. She’s physically strong because she’s combat-trained (and inhuman); she’s intuitive because she’s lived over a hundred years; she’s casually deceptive because she lives a life based on lies. Her flaws are also well-drawn - her empathy honestly does feel like a curse, her powers don’t work in every situation just because it’s convenient for her and she is torn throughout the book by a desire to settle and a need to keep moving. She’s paranoid and distrustful but also, in places, quite noble. As a central character, she fits the bill quite nicely. She also does a pretty good line in trash talk.

The supporting cast are also solid. Casey Evans, Alex Creed, Brynne, Ronan, Oren, Sal, all brought out different sides of Dahlia at different key moments in the story, allowing us to see every facet of her personality. Character wrangling might be C.L. Schneider’s author superpower because honestly I didn’t feel like a single interaction in this book was misplaced. Everything seemed to serve a purpose and, once I got started, this book just flew by.

There are some attempts to tie unexplainable phenomena to the dragons’ interference in Earth’s history but the book doesn’t overburden this concept. Mostly, it is just accepted that spontaneous human combustion is struggling as a catch-all explanation for dragon immolation in the modern era and I like that. It shows progression in the fictional world that mirrors the progress we have made in our own and it’s a nice touch.

People who know me will also know that I have a soft-spot for psycho ex-girlfriends, so I was particularly taken with Brynne as a character. In particular, I enjoyed the sense of unease around her. Do we feel sorry for her because of all the terrible things that happened to her? Or do we keep in perspective that, actually, she was always just a little bit cracked? I felt that the duality of sympathy versus disgust at her actions was a prime strength of the book.

As a first book in a series, Flashpoint does an excellent job of wrapping up certain plot points by the end of the novel while leaving others open for the sequel. It is pretty clear that this isn’t a stand-alone and anyone approaching it as such will probably be disappointed. But the connections to the second book are strong and I feel like there is enough here to make this a satisfying read, while still leaving the reader eager for more.

The Salty
Dahlia has a major problem that is common in many urban fantasy protagonists, male and female. Most of the men, and a good portion of the women, have the hots for her. She is surrounded by a circle of good-looking men and women who all want to sleep with her. Her somewhat-more-platonic relationships with Casey Evans and Alex Creed are a nice change of pace, though the fact that they are both handsome is still hammered home pretty conclusively. While I get that urban fantasy does have certain genre conventions, I did start to get kind of weary of all the exceptionally pretty people. In fact, there literally isn’t a single plain-looking or overweight person in this book.

I was also of two minds about Dahlia’s attitude towards Brynne. While, yes, Brynne might always have been crazy and badly behaved, Dahlia is a lot harsher with her than she is with Ronan, who betrayed her just as many times and, while he may not be a psycho killer, is at least as unsympathetic. Obviously, there is a very real, very troubling precedent of women forgiving their cheating partners but not the other women (even though the other women owe them nothing), it did diminish my respect for Dahlia that she was constantly willing to forgive Ronan for all his wrong-doings but remained generally unsympathetic towards Brynne throughout. The only difference, for me, is that Ronan could conceivably have been allowed to live, while Brynne needed to be put down for her own good as well as everyone else’s. A little sympathy on Dahlia’s part wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Also, honestly, if you’re trying to describe the ethereal majesty of the centuries-old queen of dragons’ human form, maybe don’t compare her to a stripper. There’s an issue of using the appropriate language for a scene and I feel like that really diminished Naalish as a character and as a presence. I couldn’t really take her seriously after that. Oddly enough, the same didn’t happen with the male dragon-shifters.

The Aftertaste
On the whole, Flashpoint is a good urban fantasy novel. Dahlia is a balanced character, she has a strong supporting cast to play off and the villain is perfect both in terms of her personal grudge against Dahlia and her connection to the wider universe. The cast’s unrelenting sexiness did become a little tiring after the first few chapters but it didn’t distract too much from what was, in essence, a well-plotted, fast-paced, action-packed tale with a number of unique and interesting takes on classic genre conventions. The world-building is smooth, the magic system is robust and versatile and there are surprises galore.

One thing is for sure. Whether they’re hot or not, lyrriken are definitely cool.